Bar Harbor Remains an Outlier in Seasonality Consultant Says.

Carrie Jones

Apr 10, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Restaurant Barn.

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BAR HARBOR—Bar Harbor’s tourism planning hit some turbulence this week when some task force members questioned numbers and some of the focus behind a key report.

The discussion unfolded as the town’s Sustainable Tourism Task Force reviewed a consultant’s report meant to help Bar Harbor plan for and potentially guide tourism’s long-term economic and community impacts. But as members scrutinized the findings, questions about occupancy rates, essential services, and the role of tourism in local life raised a broader concern: whether the town can confidently move forward with policy decisions if some of the underlying data—and some of the report’s assumptions—remain in dispute.

The Bar Harbor Sustainable Tourism Task Force explored that in real-time during its meeting April 8 when sub-consultant Edmund Morris went over questions inspired by his February report on the town.

One of those questions was that his research showed that the winter occupancy rate (December through March) in Bar Harbor was approximately 2,100-3,600. That seemed too high to the commenter. Morris dove back into the figure.

“We estimated there were 856 occupied rooms on average for those months,” Morris said, April 8, instead. His modeling was set at the maximum number of possible rooms.

“I’m very, very happy to update those. I just need the confirmation from the task force to do that,” he said of reducing the number to 856, adding that it wouldn’t change the story too much about the big seasonal swings of visitors to the town.

However, according to task force members Jeremy Dougherty, who works for Witham Family Hotels and restauranteur Michael Boland as well as Brandon William Monroe, who works for Stay Bar Harbor and was watching the meeting, the numbers were still dramatically off.

Monroe asked where that winter occupancy number came from.

“It’s an estimate,” Morris said. “It’s our best guess.”

“It’s about 10% of that,” Monroe said.

Dougherty agreed that winter hotel occupancy in Bar Harbor is closer to 80-100 rooms a night.

This actually would support an even greater seasonal swing in visitors than Morris originally discussed.

The 13-member task force, appointed by the Town Council, is meant to create a vision of what sustainable tourism means for Bar Harbor in the hopes of helping the town to get that vision while also working with other town tools such as its comprehensive plan.

When it comes to tourism, there are many factors the town can’t control alone.

Acadia National Park, has been hosting 3.9-4 million visits a year since 2021. The Maine Department Of Transportation controls the one road onto and off the island. Other towns do not have caps on vacation rentals or lodging moratoriums. Dougherty spoke to how no one can control social media and posts about the area and those laudatory posts may then potentially bring other people to visit and have the same experiences that they see others have.

Morris had presented his 60-page report to the town’s Sustainable Tourism Task Force, this winter, arguing that while the waterfront strains under peak-season pressure, the town and Acadia National Park remain largely unknown outside the United States and Canada.

In February, Morris described Bar Harbor’s core challenge: not attracting more visitors, but managing dramatic seasonal swings while protecting services for year-round residents. He repeated those themes at the April 8 meeting.

Earlier in the meeting, Boland spoke to his worries about the report. He also said that there were great elements to it.

“I’m just really nervous about moving forward on making decisions based on this report because I find a lot of flaws to be very honest and blunt,” Boland said.

One of those issues was that the town didn’t have enough essential services because of tourism.

Comparing Bar Harbor to Millinocket, Skowhegan, and Belfast, in February, Morris spoke to what he believes is an undersupply of dentists, grocery stores, personal care, trades, hardware, and auto mechanics in Bar Harbor. He used control averages per 1,000 residents to come to these conclusions.

There is an oversupply of tour operators, hotels and lodging, restaurants, tourism retail, healthcare, and banks, he said.

Using his graph, a town of 5,000 would need approximately 7.5 hardware stores to hit the control average or 15 auto mechanics.

Skowhegan, however, has more than 8,000 residents as opposed to Bar Harbor’s. Like Ellsworth, it is a county seat. Millinocket was also a comparison. This town, which has historically been focused on the paper industry, has just over 4,000 residents and a great distance to get to other areas for those essential services.

Boland said that the town has several services because of tourism. He explained how a veterinarian moved specifically to the town because she wanted to live in a beautiful spot.

If that premise of the report is true, Boland said, it might be more linked to the rural nature of the state of 1.4 million people.

“This happens all over the country, right? We’re lacking dentists all over the country,” Boland said.

“How much we’re going to move forward based on flawed premises is very concerning to me,” he said.

There are other intertwined factors such as the state’s rural nature, online and big box shopping creating stiff competition for local retail stores, and lower birth rates nationwide that link to decreasing school enrollments and maternity room closures across Maine and other rural communities, and the older demographic of Bar Harbor’s population.

According to Bar Harbor’s Existing Conditions Report, “Residents over the age of 65 comprise 19% of Bar Harbor’s total population, making it the largest age cohort. This cohort also grew by 32% between 2011 and 2019.”

Boland also spoke to the positive value of the Mount Desert Island Hospital, which is independently run.

“It’s probably the best health care in the state right now,” Boland said, and he said much of that has to do with tourism and second home owners on the island.

“While I found a lot of great points,” in the report, he said, he also “found a lot of flawed things.”

One flaw was to be concerned about corporate consolidation of weekly rentals in the town.

“We’ve already done that. We’ve already got a limit on weekly rentals,” Boland said, referencing the town’s cap on short-term rentals that are not the primary residence of the owner.

“Corporate ownership is not a problem here,” he said.

He advocated working with other towns and the League of Towns as a focus of the report and the task force’s goals.

“Before we move forward with saying, ‘Here’s where we’re going to solve the problem,’ that we make sure that the problems are real,” Boland said.

Task Force member John Kelly took a slightly different tact.

“Let’s not find problems that have not been identified. As far as I know, no one in the public workshops have said, ‘My God, I can’t get an auto mechanic because of tourism,’” Kelly said.

Increased international visitors could be a threat as Morris predicts, but there are enough problems currently, Kelly said, to deal with.

“If we have solutions to deal with today’s problems, we’ll be able to handle the future problems,” Kelly said. “I don’t think the time and energy spent talking about essential services is relevant to the issues we’re dealing with tourism.”

When he moved here 25 years ago, he said, there was a car dealership. That is gone now and was replaced by a hotel.

“But, since I’ve moved here the Criterion Theatre has flourished. In terms of quality of life, I’d rather have the Criterion Theatre here than a car dealership,” Kelly said.

He can go to Ellsworth or Trenton, approximately 20 or 10 miles away, to buy a car, he said.

Morris said that when he finds something, he is observing the data. His role is to present that data. Earlier in the meeting, he said the data concerns him (and some that would keep him awake at night) would be the massive shifts in seasonality, what would happen if the town’s hotels and restaurants were purchased by corporate interests rather than being locally owned, and what would happen if international visitors suddenly increased. These are key themes he’s been stressing since November 2025.

A dozen organizations attended a workshop at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, March 25. There were two open houses on March 26. One session was in the early afternoon and another was in the early evening.

“There was great engagement throughout,” Ben Nussbaumer of J.E. Austin Associates said via Zoom.

He shared community-generated solutions from the labs; some contradicted each other.

Many solutions tht were generated, he said, have costs associated with them. Some are beyond the town’s control (such as a local lodging tax which has to be approved by the state legislature and hasn’t been despite efforts, for decades or widening the state-owned two-lane road off and onto Mount Desert Island). Some have already been done, such as restricting short-term rentals. Some can’t continue legally, according to Kelly—such as a forever lodging moratorium. Some—such as having two cruise ship disembarkation sites for the much lessened amount of cruise ship traffic due to 1,000 or less disembarkation limits (before fines)—seemed a bit behind the times to one task force member.

During public comment at the April 8 meeting, Carol Chappell, who said that she is over 70, said she had a different opinion than Kelly’s on essential services, saying that she lives two blocks from the grocery store and two blocks from the town dock and can’t access those services easily in the summer.

Where employees used to park was taken over by hotel parking. She’s not going to carry six bags of grocery stores those two blocks but can’t find a place to park in the summer. Ells Pier, the town dock, is similar, she said.

“It’s not an option any more,” she said. “It is very hard to access the services that we have because of overcrowding in the summer.”

Most of that is parking, she said, and it needs to be dealt with.

“It doesn’t feel friendly any more. It was,” she said.

She also complained that the ice that occurs in Maine in the winter isn’t conductive for herself or for tourists and that would hinder a year-round tourist economy. She wondered what other economic drivers could happen, mentioning the creation of the College of the Atlantic over a half of a century ago and the two science labs.

“Carol mentioned it there. The sentiment that the locals feel unfriendly or the business community is unfriendly to locals,” Monroe said. “One thing Edmund mentioned is that when other countries might decide to invest and make it a financial decision. I think it’s a careful line to keep. Remember that it’s local ownership right now.”

He mentioned Boland who owns multiple restaurants with partners. He mentioned the Witham Family who owns multiple hotels. He mentioned his own employer, Stephen Coston and Brian Shaw, who own hotels and grew up and went to high school on Mount Desert Island. The Walsh Family, owners of multiple hotels, are from Brewer.

“These are the best versions of large business we can have. If we continue this negative words, ‘oh the businesses suck and the owners suck,’ they are the ones that are going to sell to China, like he says, when they come and those people are not going to care about the community. This is kind of the last point where the locals still are in control. Let’s be friendly to one another. Let’s remember we are on the same team,” Monroe said.

Restaurants aren’t a starter business any longer, he said, but the community could encourage programs for starter businesses.

“The next wave coming through is not going to be nice to the community,” Monroe said.

“One of the things I enjoyed about Bar Harbor,” Morris said, “is local ownership.”

Morris, founder of Equator-AI, a market intelligence platform based in Australia, had zoomed into the meeting as a sub consultant and he is according to The Conscious Traveler, “a former speechwriter turned data storyteller.”

The narrative he told about Bar Harbor is this: he believes that the town is undiscovered by most of the world, as is Acadia National Park. Most of its daily visits in the summer are at the downtown waterfront area. And he believes it lacks essential services compared to some other Maine towns.

“This is the moment and it’s probably the easiest it’s going to be,” Morris said.

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All photos: Shaun Farrar/Bar Harbor Story

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Tourism Management Task Force

Please use this email to contact the task force: STMTaskForce@barharbormaine.gov.

To watch the meeting.